Suppose as a thought-experiment that you are the first true human, living some 400,000 years ago. You have been awakened by a stroke of higher knowledge to a sense of your own nature and potential — but you have no one with whom to share that awareness.

The near-humans around you are by no means dumb. Their brains are probably larger than ours today. They have prodigious memories and an encyclopedic knowledge of the local plants and animals and inorganic materials. But they are very literal minded. They take their guidance from a collective belief system that tells them what to think and how to act, and they are incapable of seeing beyond that.

What would you do? How would you go about breaking them out of their limitations and raising them to a higher level of awareness? You are, after all, just one person, with a narrow lifespan and little chance of finding disciples among your contemporaries.

Your only option is to institute changes in the belief system itself that will live on after you.

Those changes will have to fulfill three criteria. They must have an immediate social value that will cause them to be accepted and maintained even by the unenlightened. They must include a subversive element that will chip away at rigid assumptions and speak directly to those who are prepared to break free of their cultural conditioning. And they must contain coded information that will provide those few with clues on how to further the great project of humanization.

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I went back to the previous entry after posting it and found it kind of murky, so I reworked it a bit to make my points clearer and tie up most of the loose ends. There was, however, one point that I’d deliberately deferred until later, because I knew it would take an entire entry to do it justice. That is the question of intentionality.

The dilemma I’m facing is that the cycles can look very different depending on the angle from which you view them. Seen from a distance, they give a strong impression of conscious design — especially the phase which extends from the collapse of one dominant partnership to the formation of the next. That’s why I wrote in the previous entry that “this cascade of adjustments, which I’ve repeatedly compared to a wacky Rube Goldberg device, might be better characterized as a deliberate juggling act, guided at every point by higher intentionality.”

On the other hand, if you examine these changes from the perspective of someone living through them, there’s no obvious sense of deliberation. They appear instead as the summation of a host of spontaneous decisions on the part of many autonomous individuals. We all contribute to this process through the attitudes we endorse, the people with whom we associate, even the clothing we wear and the food we eat. Some of us may take a more active role by offering new interpretations of existing visions or giving artistic and philosophical form to the vague hints of emerging visions. But it’s always done on-the-fly and in-the-moment and shows no sign of being coordinated on any higher level.

But then again, if you step back and focus on the picture instead of the pixels, all those individual choices start to blend together into something that resembles the thought processes of a single great mind — mulling over the deep questions of existence, trying out various experiments and marking them as successes or failures, occasionally arguing with itself about how to proceed, and crafting increasingly elaborate frameworks for understanding.

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There can be something intensely liberating about referring back to old research notes. They may appear outdated or irrelevant, but they can also remind you of forgotten truths and send your mind racing off in unexpected directions. That’s what happened to me in the course of writing the previous entry, and I wound up expressing opinions that were at odds with much of what I’ve recently said about dominant partnerships.

I’ve been somewhat scornful of dominant partnerships lately, dismissing them as fossilized and untranscendent in comparison with the younger visions — but that wasn’t always the case. When I first recognized the existence of the cycle of visions, it was because the dominant partnerships leaped out at me. It seemed plain that they set the distinctive tone of each era, legitimized its social and religious institutions, and inspired its major cultural achievements.

It took me longer to realize that younger visions were already developing around the margins of the partnership, and even then I focused chiefly on the next one in line, which serves as a focal point for discontent and opposition to the reigning worldview. I regarded the two newest visions as no more than vague, mystical intimations that might inspire the occasional artist or philosopher but had little impact on society as a whole.

Over the last year or two, however, my attitude has undergone a complete reversal. I’ve become fascinated by the birth and growth of the youngest visions, and I’ve come to see them as having a mysterious, subterranean power that inspires the most creative and progressive aspects of society and serves as the engine of cultural evolution and transformation.

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Alexei remarked after reading the last entry that he’d found it hard to follow, and I had to admit I found it a bit hard to follow myself. Part of the problem was that I’d attempted to weave several different strands into a single narrative, and the result wasn’t as seamless as I’d hoped.

But I see now there’s also a more fundamental problem. In the course of trying to pinpoint the underlying mechanism of the cycles, I’ve been focusing in finer and finer detail on the factors surrounding the birth of each new vision — and I’m starting to think that this was misguided.

The birth of a new vision is a crucial factor in every cycle. It’s the magical moment, the point at which undiluted transcendence pours into the world. But it’s only the final act in an extended sequence of events that have weakened or distorted the existing visions and made a new vision necessary. It’s not what drives the cycle.

So this strikes me as a good time to take a step back and present a more holistic overview of the landscape. And I believe the best way to do that is to pull out my very earliest notes on the recurring sequence of cultural moods that marks every cycle and start integrating them with everything I’ve learned since.

As I believe I’ve mentioned in passing, my own journey on this path began during the dismal first week of November 1972, when as an alternative to obsessing over the imminent reelection of Richard Nixon, I plunged intensively into exploring certain ideas about cultural change that I’d been toying with during the previous few months.

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I’ve spent most of the last year wrestling with one specific question: how the cycle of visions began and what keeps it going. I sometimes wonder whether I’ve become too narrowly obsessed with this one issue, but I don’t see any way past it. My goal is to present a coherent theory of human history, not just an eccentric set of speculations, and for that I need a plausible mechanism.

In the previous entry, I hit on something I think is very important — that the birth of the spirit vision came about when the first true shamans found themselves completely alienated from their larger society. To rectify that, and to prove they weren’t crazy, they needed a model of reality that would verify their perceptions and make it possible to communicate them to others.

My initial assumption was that this extreme degree of alienation must have been a one-time-only event, because each new vision since then has emerged from a predecessor of the same type. But as I thought about it, I realized that the same situation arises whenever the romantic aspect of the outsider vision has been marginalized and demoralized to the point where it no longer serves as a vehicle for higher possibility. That leaves its adherents as isolated and unable to explain themselves as any shaman of 250,000 years ago.

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Sometimes I feel as though this blog is crawling along one tiny step at a time, but then a dam suddenly breaks and sets off a cascade of reconsiderations. The previous entry triggered one of those avalanches, and I’m still sorting out its implications.

When I initially developed my theory of the visions, I assumed that the basic unit of the cycles was the individual vision and that what kept things moving along was the gradual loss of transcendence as each vision matured. This was adequate as a working hypothesis, but it never answered certain fundamental questions: Precisely what happens when a new vision is born? How and why did the cycle of replacement get started? And why does the same pattern recur in such similar form from one turn of the cycle to the next?

Now I’m realizing that my problems arose from trying to take the visions in isolation and that they are better seen as forming an ecosystem in which each one reflects all the others. When any vision falters, it leaves an empty environmental niche, and the system is thrown out of balance until it can respond by repairing the damage and filling the gap.

This self-maintaining quality might be compared to the ability of DNA to repair itself — an ability that marks the dividing line between non-living matter and living beings. In a similar way, the self-repairing ability of the system of visions might be seen as a crucial accomplishment that pushed us across the threshold from almost-but-not-quite-human to fully human.

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I wasn’t altogether satisfied with the previous entry, and though I’ve done some rewriting to tighten it up, it still has one major flaw: It presents the birth of a successor to the transformation vision and the split within the kinship vision as if they were two separate events, when they were actually the product of a single, interconnected movement of thought.

This is something I only realized as I began the current entry, and though I’m still working out the implications, two points are already clear. One is that in order to maintain our engagement with higher knowledge, we need access to fully transcendent visions of all three types at once. The other is that this access is so crucial that whenever the transcendence of a vision is at risk, we will leap to restore it — or if it is lost despite our efforts, we will quickly devise a substitute.

Like everything involving higher knowledge, our need to draw on each type of vision simultaneously is something of a mystery, but it appears to result from the inadequacies of human perception. Because we are unable to grasp existence as a whole, we rely instead on three separate streams of knowledge — scientific, social, and inner experience. However, none of these is designed to facilitate profound understanding, and they all suffer from unavoidable blind spots and distortions.

Our best solution has always been to observe reality through the lens of all three modes in combination. Not only does this provide a more complete picture, but the effort to resolve the contradictions among them pushes us into the intuitive and integrative thought processes typical of higher knowledge. For that reason, the three newest and most transcendent visions regularly operate as a triad.

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In the last several entries, I’ve been trying to solve the riddle of why the cycle of visions always follows an identical pattern, even though each individual vision is a unique expression of higher knowledge. The answer appears to lie in the demands of ordinary life, which put severe constraints on when we have access to higher knowledge and how far we are able to pursue it.

One effect of those constraints is that even though every vision starts off as a bridge between what is and what might be, its practical side gradually gains dominance over the mystical. Eventually, the vision becomes entirely pragmatic, no longer performs its original function, and can only be replaced.

Another is that this process is not continuous but proceeds in sudden bursts. These occur mainly during times of crisis, when entire societies briefly adopt a more flexible and intuitive style of functioning that greatly enhances their receptivity to higher knowledge.

The third, and most subtle, is that these periods of openness have two contradictory outcomes. They give many people the courage to give up on their failing institutions and turn for guidance to the most mature of the emerging visions. But at the same time, a relative few realize that popular acceptance of the vision is draining it of transcendence and start to pursue alternatives.

The recognition that a vision is beyond repair is not arrived at lightly or without emotional turmoil. But eventually it become undeniable — and that happened for the first time in a transition that began around 170,000 years ago.

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Back at the start of the human adventure, the sole function of the visions was to enable people to engage directly with the universe, with one another, and with their own inner nature. That kind of engagement had definite practical results. It could make a small group of hunter-gatherers more efficient, more mutually supportive, and more able to tap into their shamanistic powers. But it was never intended as a method of mundane problem-solving.

Mature visions, in contrast, are intensely focused on problem-solving. This gives them the ability to change the world, but only at the cost of falling out of touch with their intuitive and experiential side. They lose their nearly magical ability to synchronize human efforts, and their mystical origins are either forgotten or reduced to rote formulas.

The first mature vision came into being shortly after 200,000 years ago, when the human community was faced with a prolonged ice age that posed a threat to their very survival. As everything they had previously relied upon failed them, they lost faith in the old, instinctual ways. They turned instead to their one remaining ace in the hole — the transformation vision — and began using it as a guide to reshape the world around them.

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If human cultures do alternate on a regular basis between states of mature stability and adolescent plasticity, as I suggested in the previous entry, it would certainly help explain the rise and fall of dominant partnerships. However, it doesn’t answer a more fundamental question: Why are aging visions always replaced by successors of the same general type rather than simply being updated and rejuvenated?

The answer to this question is crucial to understanding what happened nearly 200,000 years ago, when the original vision of the physical world took on the moral and practical authority to lead the human community through the great ice age. In the course of that transition, it surrendered its own claims to transcendence, but it gave birth to a successor — the cosmic order vision. This launched the cycle of replacement which has continued ever since.

But why? Why was the replacement necessary?

On one level, the sequence of thought seems obvious. As people developed a greater mastery of the world around them, they became less able to perceive it as a place of inexhaustible wonder. And so they began looking to the heavens for the mystery that was no longer to be found on earth.

But why did that shift require an entirely new vision of existence — starting from different premises and arriving at different conclusions — and not merely a minor tweaking of the old one?

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